Building an App that Moves Hangouts Beyond the Group Chat

Matthew Guella ’26 spent his pre-Yale years as a consultant at Bain, thinking in frameworks and tables. Building a social app with no coding experience was not in his playbook. Neither, for that matter, was the cancer diagnosis he received just before his final semester at SOM. And yet, this winter, Guella shipped Pulse—a social coordination app now live on both the Apple App Store and Google Play—from a hospital room, a chemo chair, and whatever hours in between allowed.

“I’ll probably beat this,” he says of his lymphoma diagnosis, with a broad smile and the same matter-of-factness he brings to his work. “And I’ve got a pretty open calendar, so I’ll continue tinkering.”

The Problem: Group Chats Don’t Scale

The idea came from a summer catch-up in Austin with a close friend. She had a recurring frustration: she’d open her phone and realize that ten mutual friends were within two city blocks, but she had no easy way to pull anyone together for a quick activity. Texting one person felt too pressurized; blasting the group chat felt too distracting. So she’d just let it go.

Guella knew the feeling. Pulse solves this problem with a lightweight broadcast: send a “pulse” to your friend network when you’re planning a regular activity such as going for a walk, running an errand, or grabbing a drink, and anyone who’s free can join. A Quick Pulse feature—built after SOM professor Kyle Jensen told Guella he didn’t want to fill out a form just to say he was grabbing lunch—reduces the process to a single tap.

“The other thing Kyle pointed out was, well, he has kids,” Guella notes. “As someone without kids myself, the struggle to plan playdates is something I hadn’t thought of.” Ask any parent to young children about making other parent friends, and they’ll likely sympathize with that plight. Now, Guella imagines that the app could allow parents and their children the opportunity to get to know each other in a low-stakes way around shared interests and activities.

There’s a larger ambition underneath the app as well. A U.S. Surgeon General report found that chronic loneliness carries health risks equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Meta’s own data, disclosed in federal court, shows that only about 7% of time on Instagram is now spent on content from friends. Guella thinks there’s genuine demand for a tool that helps people connect with the people they already know for everyday activities—and that no one has quite built it yet.

Building It: Vibe Coding, Upwork, and No Back Button

Guella’s first attempt at building Pulse himself—using AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude—ran into the same wall most non-technical founders hit: the tools were great for static websites, but couldn’t reliably manage a full-stack app. “It would just rewrite the code,” he says. He pivoted to hiring a development team on Upwork, guided by his father’s advice: spend $5,000, get something out the door, and test it.

The process had rough patches. The app shipped with Guella’s last name misspelled. The back button didn’t work reliably for the first month of testing. When he flagged it, the team suggested users could just navigate from the home screen. (“Dude, that’s not what a back button is,” he jokes.) He overhauled the design mid-development, but by December of 2025, the app was finished.

App Store approval brought its own headaches, but after a month and a half of revisions, both Apple and Android approved the app. Android, for the record, approved it overnight.

Early Traction and What’s Next

Pulse has around 100 downloads so far, primarily among Guella’s SOM cohort and friend groups in Austin, Chicago, and NYC, which have adopted it organically. He’s actively looking for a technical co-founder to accelerate development, with a better friend-discovery experience high on the feature list. The app currently costs him almost nothing to run.

“This app consumed my last fall at SOM,” Guella reflects. “I planned to do a lot more marketing in the spring, but you know—the cancer’s a bit of an issue.”

With accommodations in place, Guella will graduate on time. Chemo continues through June. Guella is clear-eyed about the road ahead, understanding the challenge inherent to convincing a friend group to all adopt a new app. But he’s not in a rush. He’ll keep building in whatever space the year allows. Many founders worry about finding the right moment to launch their venture; but fewer people have a better argument for why that moment is already here.

Pulse is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Learn more at pulseshc.com.